Report Faults Lax Controls On Screeners At Airports

By PHILIP SHENON

Published: February 6, 2004

WASHINGTON, Feb. 5—
An internal investigation at the Homeland Security Department has found that hiring of tens of thousands of airport screeners after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was so haphazard that many screeners were allowed to remain on duty at security checkpoints for weeks or months after it had been determined that they had serious criminal records.

The department's inspector general issued a report on the findings on Thursday. It said screeners remained on the payroll and retained their badges even after the findings that they had been convicted on charges as serious as manslaughter. The department often took weeks or months to discharge the screeners, the report found.

''Screeners were hired, trained and, in some cases, put to work contrary to sound personnel practices,'' the inspector general, Clark Kent Ervin, said in the report. ''We identified many issues that undermined the creation of a federal screener staff that can ensure the security of commercial air transportation.''

In November 2001, two months after the terror attacks, Congress created the Transportation Security Administration and directed it to take over passenger and baggage screening at the nation's airports, replacing private companies that had been strongly criticized as lax.

By December 2002, the agency had hired 55,600 screeners -- too often, the report found, without adequate checks to determine whether they had criminal records or failed other employment requirements.

Last year, the agency, now part of the Homeland Security Department, fired more than 1,900 screeners after background checks found criminal records, deceptions on applications and other problems.

In a statement, the acting administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, David M. Stone, said the report ''confirms past deficiencies in T.S.A.'s screener-vetting process and, more importantly, validates the steps this agency has taken to correct them.''

Mr. Stone said that the deficiencies in the background checks involved, by the agency's calculations, ''less than 2 percent of our employees'' and that ''T.S.A. has strengthened the hiring procedures that ensure our airport screeners are second to none.''

The inspector general suggested it was not surprising that the hiring was chaotic, given the extraordinary deadlines to establish a large force of screeners.

The Transportation Security Administration hired contractors to carry out much of the background checking on an estimated 1.7 million applicants from February 2002 to December 2002.

The report said, ''While contractors performed the checks and helped T.S.A. review most results, T.S.A. was responsible for managing the contractors' work.''

The oversight of the contractors was so lax, the report said, that more than 500 boxes of background-check forms and other documents went unprocessed for months, and in some cases, the agency allowed screeners to work before their background checks had been completed.

In an interview, Mr. Ervin said that because of inadequate record keeping it was not easy to determine how often the security agency had let screeners continue working despite the knowledge of criminal pasts.

He said a spot check by his investigators at one airport -- he would not identify it or its size -- found that at least 13 screeners had been hired who were discovered to have records of criminal convictions or arrests on charges as serious as manslaughter, rape and burglary.

Twelve of the 13 remained on the payroll and kept their badges for three months or more after the discovery that they had failed criminal backgrounds check from fingerprint analyses, Mr. Ervin said, adding that he was startled by ''the fact that people that had criminal backgrounds were allowed to continue working for any period of time.''

The law that created the Transportation Security Administration requires that screeners undergo background investigations, including checks of criminal records, and that they have no convictions in the previous 10 years for any of 28 felonies like forgery, possession of illegal weapons, murder and espionage.